Forward and Back: (Table of Contents)
Jaroslaw Anders Caught in a dark history: review of Michael Andre Bernstein's Conspirators, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 11 April 2004, p. R3 See Text
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935, Foreword See Text
Michael Frank Istanbul from the inside out: Orhan Pamuk Istanbul: Memories and the City Alfred A. Knopf: NY, 2005, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 August 2005, R8, Forward and Back See Text
Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1997, 1965, 1964, 1960s, 1948 See Text
Ingersoll's Century History Santa Monica Bay Cities (Being Book Number Two of Ingersoll's Century Series of California Local History Annals), 1908, 1908a, Preface See Text
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, Foreward See Text
Kelyn Roberts Foreward And Back Note I, 2004
Grant H. Smith The History of the Comstock Lode 1850-1920, Geology and Mining Series No. 37, University of Nevada Bulletin: Reno, Nevada, vol. XXXVII. 1 July 1943, no. 3, (revised 1966), Ninth printing, 1980. 305pp., Forward, See Text
D. J. Waldie Our New Jerusalems: Recent Terrains: Terraforming The American West. Photographs By Laurie Brown, Poetry By Martha Ronk, Essay By Charles E. Little; Johns Hopkins University Press: 98 Pp., $55, $24.94 Paper, Los Angeles Times Book Review 24 December 2000, Foreward See Text
Notes for a Text:
KR Notes, 2004 Oceanpark.ws begins, if anywhere, twenty years ago and spirals around the gathering of documents, photographs, music, memory, and each source has its own interconnectivity to both time and linearity. The present isn't any more obvious from the advantage of twenty years perspective, nor is the past more available for easy narratives.
As well as what can be seen, heard, pictured about Ocean Park, and how Ocean Park has influenced that, and the people who happened to be here, incorporated Ocean Park, it is important to realize what can be seen from Ocean Park, and those people who happened to have lived here and looked, heard, and come to know what their vistas and prospects have been. I've mentioned several times the permeability of the space, the sociality and territoriality but the automobile, the train, the plain, the plane, the media, the five or six boutique newspapers that have replaced the L.A.Times and the Evening Outlook. The wash of millions of people from Los Angeles and the tourists from all over the world; conventions and cultural events that draw five or five hundred people; the splash of radio, TV and now cable and the internet; the flyovers, drive-bys, thump-ka-thump of the vibrating speaker-car. The importaton and consumption of food in supermarkets, farmer's markets, and destination restaurants and neighborhood establishments. Transformative and permeable, a constantly shifting light, fog and something of a distance, and a cultural production that changes the ambient qualities of the neighborhood into life altering situations. People move on, out, taking what's important to them but leaving the immateriality richer, more liminal, more illuminated . . .
In the manner of Terry Schoonhaven and the Venice Fine Arts Squad, The Isle of California, and Tom Jenkins*; Apocalytic Eucaplytus; Richard Pettibon, Neo-con Romantic Revisionist, Duh? . . .
"The Whitney Brothers . . . . Five Abstract Film Exercises. When first screened in Los Angeles and New York, the films, seen as shockingly radical, were described as electronic music and neon images, "from the science fiction future."'
Documents
Jaroslaw Anders Caught in a dark history: review of Michael Andre Bernstein's Conspirators, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 11 April 2004, p. R3
" . . .
"A literary scholar and critic, Bernstein believes that our visits to the past are motivated less often by a curiosity about life as it was than by the fact that we have a priviledged, analytical relationship to it. . . . Time has already assigned meaning to events, revealed their consequences, separated the substantial from the accidental. More often than not, it has already judged the past actors, which allows us to be a bit judgemental without appearing presumptuous.
"Though the present is mostly the domain of irony - since everything can still turn out a farce instead of a tragedy - the past appears to us as the last refuge of "moral seriousness." . . .
" . . .
"This reticence seems a result of Bernstein's theory of historical fiction, which he presented in his 1994 book of essays, Foregone Conclusions. There he argues against "the sense-making authority of the future," which tends to limit our interest in the past only to what foreshadows the future and "implies a closed universe in which all choices have already been made." In Bernstein's view, the true homage to the past, especially a past irreversibly destroyed, is an approach he calls "sideshadowing." He describes it as "a gesturing to the side, to a present dense with multiple and mutually exclusive possibilities of what is to come."
" . . . a writer's task is to look away and avoid the piety that the knowledge of the future imposes. Instead, the writer must pay attention to the odd, bizarre, disturbing and marginal, which . . . contain "the seed of diverse and mutally exclusive possible futures. . ."
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935
Chaoter XV Underneath the Surface
"[p. 182] With the coming of the new century, automobiles came in.
"In no other part of the world did motor cars make a more sweeping change in the customs, the thought or the manner of life of the people. For one thing, they scattered the pueblo all over the map. People went to the outlying sections where they could have room and the bucolic atmosphere. They brought the desert, the mountains and the sea into the daily life of the pueblo. A great many people of moderate means have a city home, a beach cottage and a mountain or desert cabin. Most of all, the automobile brought to the pueblo the consciousness of its traditions. It was not until we were able to motor to the old missions that the architecture of Los Angeles "went Spanish"-or that we remembered the flavor and speech of the conquistadores.
" . . .
Michael Frank Istanbul from the inside out: Orhan Pamuk Istanbul: Memories and the City Alfred A. Knopf: NY, 2005, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 August 2005, R8, Forward and Back
". . .
"In Istanbul, [Pamuk] refers to an essay by critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin on writers' descriptions of great cities . . .
"[Pamuk] pays respect to Istanbul's writers, reserving special affection for . . . Resat Ekrem Koçu, whose 12 (incomplete) volumes of the Istanbul Encyclopedia Pamuk says "rightly and proudly" claimed to be the world's first encyclopedia about a single city. . . ." [I would guess that if the claim were to be the only encyclopedia about a single city, one might miake a list.]
The Lost Suitcase
Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1997, 1965, 1964, 1960s, 1948
Introduction: researching alternative histories of the art left
[p. 1] . . .
[p. 2] Specific images of two sites signify major aspects of the research for the book. . . . The first image, familiar to many art historians, is the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, on the outskirts of Los Angeles . . .
The museum, including the research center, is one of seven programmes of the John Paul Getty Trust, a private operating foundation devoted to the visual arts. It has enormous financial backing . . . [filled with objécts]. High Security, a booking systems for visits and all of the idyllic control of cultural selection confirming its status within the paradoxical character of modern museums. A new much larger Getty Center for the History and the Humanities and a museum, twice the size of the present one, [p. 3] opened in 1997, just down the freeway . . . the research institute was described in the Getty Calendar (Winter, 1995) as a "think tank that gathers researchers from different disciplines and stimulates them to communicate with each other by ways they otherwise wouldn't." The phrase "think tank" has often been used to describe the RAND (Research ANd Development) Corporation, a research institution, a few miles down the coast in Santa Monica, with similarly high levels of financial backing and security. Here since 1948 when RAND became a corporation with the help of various sources of funding including a grant of $1 million from the nascent Ford Foundation, researchers from different disciplines have been provided to stimulate them to communicate with each other and provide theoretical models on many different topics . . .
With a major influence on stategic military planning since the Second World War and particularly during the sixties, the RAND Corporation's role in the escalation of United States action in Southeast Asia led artists to picket the Corporation's building in 1964 . . . In Los Angeles the institutions of "culture" have long been connected to those other institutions in southern California that, in various ways, serve the industrial militiary complex of the United States.
The museum as an archive, repository, container, guardian of the canon of critical approval is one of the conventional sites for art and design history. The museum is, for many researchers, a site of abundance, of plentitude, of pleasure. It provides an array of objects for study, interpretation and explanation. From a variety of specializing perspectives, it is a confirmation of 'presence' with more than enough potential for cultural historians to provide critical texts on 'absense.' With the John Paul Getty Museum we have intimate relationships between corporate capital, the oil business, the power of family dynasties in the United States, possessive individualism and obsessive accumulation. This . . . is . . . not many miles away from . . . the district of Watts, a heartland of economic deprivation and racist oppression in central Los Angeles. In August 1965, a few years before the Getty re-creation was begun, Watts was in flames, in protest; an urban parallel to the rural centers of 'Civil Rights campaigns in the South. This was less than two months after the Artists' Protest Committee in Los Angeles had targeted the RAND Corporation, the recently opened Los Angeles County Art Museum and "art gallery row" on North La Cienega Boulevard, in a series of portraits primarily against United States military action in Vietnam.
Ingersoll's Century History Santa Monica Bay Cities (Being Book Number Two of Ingersoll's Century Series of California Local History Annals), 1908, 1908a, Preface
[page ii] Preface
The publication of this book is in no degree an accident, but rather the partial fulfullment of a long-cherished plan to sometimes put in permanent and fitting form the annals of some of the more historic and romantic cities and towns of Southern California. This ambition dates back to the winter season of 1888-9, when the writer arrived in the "Golden State," became impressed with the transcendent richness of its past history and its abundant promise of future growth and history making. What might have been regarded, at the time, a fancy, or inspiration, has, with the rapid passing of two decades, developed into a vivid reality. Obscure hamlets have become prospersous cities; where then were open stock ranges and broad fields of grain, have sprung up marts of trade and commerce, environed by progressive and prosperous communities. Enough time has elapsed for these cities and communities to have acquired a history, still not enough for any considerable portion of that history to be lost. A few years hence, conditions in this latter respect will have entirely changed.
The region of country of which this story treats lies within the original confines of four Spanish-Mexican land grants bordering the bay of Santa Monica and has hitherto received scant attention from historical writers. When the good works of Hubert Howe Bancroft and Judge Theodore H. Hittell were written the wonderful developments of the past twenty years had not transpired and the work of more recent writers has been of so superficial a nature as not to be of special historical value.
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, Foreward
"What the younger generation of California artists-among them Tony DeLap*, Ron Davis, Ed Moses, Fletcher Benton-came to admire about McLaughlin, [early 1950s] who worked by choice in semi-isolation on the coast south of Los Angeles, were his extraordinary independence and total commitment to an art developed on its own terms. Like David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn*, and a score of others who chose to work in California in part because they would be left alone. . . . " p. 33
"And yet McLaughlin preserved a letter from Stanton Macdonald-Wright*, "You are most kind to send me the S.F. paper clipping of [critic Alfred] Frankenstein-I hadn't seen it but he has been nice to me for some time-I'm looking forward to meeting him sometime in San Francisco-Let me add that Mrs Wright & I are sorry you two don't live nearer this center of contagion (or is it "infection") I'm sure we have much in common."
" . . . as Susan Larsen points out, McLaughlin's painting is "profoundly anti-classical. He creates disequilibrium and virtually subliminal visual and psychological motion out of stasis and symmetry." In this respect McLaughlin appears to move closer to a general Southern California aesthetic that acknowledges change and impermanence as conditions of existence." p. 34
" . . . Oskar Fischinger . . . arrived from Germany in 1936 with a reputation for abstract film animation. . . .
" . . . An underlying attitude of exploration, seeking new and different means to express ideas about sound, color, shapes, and movement, is seen in a variety of artists of the 1940s-ranging from Stanton Macdonald-Wright* to Fischinger and the Whitney brothers, James and John." p. 35
" . . .
"James and John Whitney . . . wandered even further from tradition in creating their audio-visual music. Feeling that music was too dominant in Fischinger's non-objective films, they invented a "pendulum system" to transcribe sounds directly. This optical printing and pendulum composition was the basis for their revolutionary Five Abstract Film Exercises. When first screened in Los Angeles and New York, the films, seen as shockingly radical, were described as electronic music and neon images, "from the sciene fiction future."' P. 36 William Moritz You Can't Get Then From Now, The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal, 29 Summer, 1981: 27-35
" . . .
". . . [Howard] Warshaw ['s] view of reality as an ongoing process . . . While Warshaw's absorption with process seems to relate to Action Painting, it springs from different intentions. For Warshaw, process entailed a description of the external world rather than an athletic display or a cathartic release of emotion. Intellectual in his approach, he sought complete formal control and therefore rejected spontaneous handling and its courting of chance. Thus, while flux was central to his conceptions, it expressed itself not through free-wheeling gestures but by overlays and dissolves that held points in common with motion pictures. . . "
"A filmic quality come to the fore . . . overlays of substance and shadow maintain cinematic analogies, as does its sequenced imagery, or what the artist termed "transactional figuration." "If one is thinking of observing the world in time, then those intervals [of space] change; they're not consistent . . . cubism . . . says, "I'm examining this by turning it over and looking at both sides of it, and the space goes with it" . . . If the vision of the observer is shifting, then everything shifts, not just some object in an otherwise static world."
". . . Warshaw portrays on canvas the shadowed projections of . . . the flux of the world and his aesthetic constraints upon it. Concerned with signification . . . "There's a relationship between the fact of the painting and the references the painting makes to the experience out of which it grew that's not unlike memory . . . The memory is an overtone, a referential something that isn't here but which one must think about. And one thinks about it relative to the present moment . . . It is the present moment of the past."
"In the tethering of the past to the present, Warshaw refused to conform to the modernist mandate of novelty. . . .T.S. Eliot doesn't obviate John Donne because he's more modern, any more than Picasso makes El Greco obsolete. Quite the contrary; he conforms El Greco's presence by finding him germinal, alive again in his own work. So this history is, as I say, not chronological: it's a set of graphic ideas that can constantly be interchanged, moved in their relative positions. It's a lacework, a network."
Grant H. Smith The History of the Comstock Lode 1850-1920, Geology and Mining Series No. 37, University of Nevada Bulletin: Reno, Nevada, vol. XXXVII. 1 July 1943, no. 3, (revised 1966), Ninth printing, 1980. 305pp.
[p. xi] "The Comstock Lode is nationally famous for its huge output of gold and silver . . .
"The Comstock, with this glorious history as one of the world's greatest mining camps and producers of the precious metals, will always attract mining capital searching for low-grade ores or bonanzas. The Nevada Bureau of Mines and the Mackay School of Mines . . .
"The late John A. Fulton, as director of the Bureau, over ten years ago, sought an author qualified to write a mining history of the Comstock Lode, who was qualified by both his life experience and his interest in the Lode to write such a history.
"Such a person was Grant H. Smith, a mining attorney of San Francisco. His youth was spent on the Comstock in the bonanza days as an inquisitive youngster and young miner; then he taught school and studied law and was admitted to practice by the Supreme Court of Nevada in January 1890. His later life has been in close contact with the Comstock as attorney for a number of the mines. Being a man trained in collecting and analyzing facts, along with the strong interest and perception in the historical events that stirred men's beings and brought out both the heroic and base in their characters, he brought also to this work [p. xii] the judgment of mature years and an unflagging search for source material.
[p. xii] "Ten years of research brought forth a voluminous manuscript covering not only the mining history, but also that of political and social history, and particularly the life history of the Comstock's outstanding character, John W. Mackay.
"The present director of the Bureau . . . prevailed upon Mr. Smith to take from his manuscript that mining material most suited for a Bureau bulletin, and with the aid and advice of the Director to rewrite it in the form of this bulletin.
"Enough of the absorbing personal histories of the prominent men of the Lode has been retained along with many rare illustrations to entice the average citizen of Nevada to read and realize the importance of the Comstock and of the mining industry in the life of the State.
" . . .
"During the last two years the Bureau with the aid of research by the Nevada State Writers Project of W.P.A., has compiled from the files of the old Comstock newspapers and written chronologically, the "Individual Histories of the Mines of the Comstock," fifty-six properties in all. This voluminous material is in typewritten form for consultation at the State Library in Carson City and in the Bureau's office at the Mackay School of Mines.
"In addition, there will be available at a future date as a gift to the Bureau, a detailed account of the operations of each of the principal mines covering hundreds of pages, compliled by Grant H. Smith in his research work.
"Within the last decade the United States Geological Survey has made a thorough restudy of the Comstock Lode, Dr. V.P. [p. xiii] Gianella of the Bureau aiding in the work. Due to the all-out war effort of the Survey, this new material remains unpublished.
"The Mackay School of Mines has in its library a large collection of books concerning the Comstock, in its museums on display an unrivaled collection of Comstock ores and historical relics, and in its files, a great accumultion of maps, company reports, and correspondence files. - Jay A. Carpenter, Director. [1943]
" . . .
[p. 236] "The majority of people with families lived well, but simply. Unmarried miners and other single men boarded at the many restaurants, which provided excellent fare at $30 to $35 a month. The cost of living was less than it is today; some of the items were higher, others lower. The smallest piece of money was a silver dime, ten cents, which was the price of a small basket of strawberries in season. The only money in circulation was gold and silver, although in the East they had nothing but paper currency until after the resumption of specie payments in 1879.
"Frontier life teaches men to think for themselves. This was especially true of early mining camp life in California and Nevada. The philosophy of life of the pioneers was largely the result of observation and experience. There was little dependence upon Divine Providence-men had learned to rely upon themselves. Their religion was a sort of golden rule. They encouraged and supported churches because of their influence upon the community. Ingersoll expressed their views about the Bible, and the Darwinian theory appealed to their intelligence. The mechanistic theory of the universe appeared to them as the only reasonable explanation. Man himself was only a machine, born to function according to his gifts; some fearfully and wonderfully made; others mere automatons, with many gradations between. The Comstock was a laboratory of life, in which it appeared that all men are born unequal. All of the races of the world were [p. 237] there and all types of men and women, from the highest to the lowest. One learned more of the human animal in a few years in that congested community than could be acquired in a lifetime in a conventional town.
"The average intelligence was higher in the early '60s than in the '70s when the foreign-born came in increasing numbers, although the highly intelligent members of the community maintained their standards; they read the best literature, were exceedingly well informed on all of the topics of the times, and were engaging conversationalists.
" . . . the outstanding men of those times seemed "bigger" than those of today. That was equally true in San Francisco. The explanation appears to be that they were the product of pioneer conditions, which brought out the best as well as the worst. Men are made by struggle."
D. J. Waldie Our New Jerusalems: Recent Terrains: Terraforming The American West. Photographs By Laurie Brown, Poetry By Martha Ronk, Essay By Charles E. Little; Johns Hopkins University Press: 98 Pp., $55, $24.94 Paper, Los Angeles Times Book Review 24 December 2000, Foreward
• "D.J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. He, lives in Lakewood, where he is a city official."